>> Saturday, October 14, 2017

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi

With admirable courage
and humility, comedienne Candy Pangilinan came one Monday afternoon in
June, 2009 to seek forgiveness before the city council. Moved by the purity of
her intention, the members of the local legislature individually accepted the
apology and went on to collectively rescind a resolution that had declared her
a persona non grata.

Coming
to session ready, councilor Richard Carino revealed that, over the
years, the city council had bestowed the “unacceptable
person” tag and status to five people.

Only Candy,
he noted, came and pleaded forgiveness for a faux pax that, the
comedienne stressed, was never intended to hurt.

In an
attempt to draw laughter during a show at SM-Baguio, Candy uttered “Tao po ako,
hindi Igorot”. Immediately and days after, she drew condemnation from all over
for that careless remark. Her manager qualified the correct line
was supposed to have been “Tao ako, hindi Igorot statue”.

Candy’s
impropriety was the latest in a series of slurs that, sooner or later, will be
uttered again - out of sheer ignorance about who we are. Not by her, for she learned
her lesson, but by others who still believe Igorots are ignorant, have tails
and whose ancestors lived on tree tops.

Councilor
Nick Aliping suggested a “daw-es”, a traditional Igorot cleansing
ritual to exorcise bad spirits that might have triggered the remark that hurt,
and to strengthen the peace, friendship and harmony triggered by Candy’s
atonement, her appeal for understanding and her wish to understand.

Aliping,
one of six councilors who identified themselves to candy as Igorots, was into a ribbing,
estimating the ritual might require at least a pair of cows or
carabaos, plus 128 sacrificial pigs to each of the city’s 128 barangays.

He
suggested Rep. Mauricio Domogan may consider sponsoring the animal
sacrifice.The huge crowd gathered at the session hall were figuring out the
costs when Aliping advised Candy to consult a “mambunong”, a native priest who
might deem even only a chicken would do.

To brush
off misconceptions about misrepresentation, Domogan said he was not
“lawyering”: for Candy. When he heard the slur, the solon immediately demanded
public apology. Candy later called in his office to say she would publicly
apologize. .

Hearing her
apologize, lawyer George Dumawing, a native of Kalinga and past president of
the Baguio-Benguet Integrated Bar of the Philippines , assured he would
withdraw a suit his fellow lawyers asked him to file on their behalf against
the comedienne.

On Candy’s
wish to do more than apologize for her error, Dumawing advised her to tell her
colleagues in showbiz to stop depicting Igorots in a bad light in their films,
television shows, performances and utterances.

All’s well
that ends well. Well, at least until fellow aging Igorot newsman Greg Taguiba
of Bontoc, Mt. Province shared me a text message he got from another Igorot.
Greg swore he had the sneaky suspicion the message originated from my
cellphone.

“It said
Igorots are immune from swine flu because Igorots (as deduced from Candy’s
remark), are not humans,” Greg said.

“That’s
illogical and dangerous to believe,” I replied, “ as the virus developed in and
affected swine first.”

That’s it.
Aside from logic, we Igorots do have a sense of humor which makes us human,
too. We love jokes, even at our own expense, provided they’re timely and
cracked during the appropriate occasion. Igorots can forgive and
cope with a bad one -and their anger - by having it mutate to a more
palatable or two-way version.

Ask Ike
Picpican, the Igorot anthropology student and professor who did an
honest-to-goodness research on the Kabayan mummies. He was curator of the St.
Louis University Museum when I last met him.

Ike told me
of a juxtaposition quite different from Candy’s. He had the occasion to turn the
tables when a rowdy group of students on a field trip here broke the quiet of
the museum with derisive laughter.